Total Recall

In a nutshell, Total Recall is a great movie. I'd even go so far as to say that after Blade Runner, it's the best film adaptation of a Dick novel, this time with a superb performance by the brilliantly perverse Paul Verhoeven. His direction is dynamic and his relish in lots of blood and violence that is typical of him is irresistible in a way. The story is properly Dick-esque, dark with an ambiguous ending and that's how it should be. The visual effects are fantastic for their time and were deservedly rewarded with an Oscar. And I must not forget to highlight Jerry Goldsmith's imaginative soundtrack, which is impossible not to listen to and which is one of the best that the Master has composed. A sci-fi gem for the connoisseurs. (09/27/2003)

This whole Dick adaptation has one little hitch. Namely that they didn’t cast a more restrained actor than Arnie for the main role. I like him a lot, but he doesn't really fit into the paranoid adaptation of Dick's work with his character, even though he tries his best. Otherwise, everything is as it should be. Pace, effects, direction, and vision of the future. Along with the unbeatable Blade Runner, this is clearly the best movie adaptation of P. K. Dick. (06/25/2007)

Sometimes, all a successful sci-fi movie needs is to set up the scenery and intensify the music. Verhoeven takes a somewhat questionable approach, unleashing his twisted taste and giving Arnie the feeling that he is playing a cleverly packaged game against all the evil members of society. No, this is not the way. Blood fits in Robocop, and dealing with an unconventional marital crisis fits in a more open satire. (07/02/2005)

Originally, I had four stars in mind when I reminisced about the film's premiere in movie theaters years ago. Now I watched it again and I have moved on somewhat, and the overt B-movie popcorn simplicity bothers me now. The film reminds me of cheap mainstream adventure comics with sci-fi themes, which still lie in my library and shaped my taste at a certain time, but nowadays I read and watch different things. The classic sci-fi theme of Philip K. Dick's version has little in common with Paul Verhoeven's version, but it is appropriately action-packed, filled with chases, shooting, and bloody fights, so for a viewer who is not compelled to think, it is a joyride. Verhoeven traditionally does not shy away from brutal scenes, so fans can enjoy severed hands and blasted human bodies and protruding entrails. Nevertheless, it is one of the few better films where Arnold Schwarzenegger appears in the lead role. Though his performance here is not outstanding, he also does not descend into silliness. Overall impression: 55%. The film's strong point is the set design, which even years later does not feel outdated and was top-notch at the time of the film's release. A colorful sci-fi spectacle for teenagers. (12/09/2007)

I remembered Panos Cosmatos saying that his aesthetics came from finding videotapes as a boy in the late 1980s, when he would form his own idea of the stories contained in them from the images on the covers, which were ultimately far more normal than one would expect from these samples. I realized that this was about the fourth time I had actually seen Total Recall and it was only this time that I sort of somehow knew what it was actually about. Not that the plot is all that convoluted, but it is so consistently littered with spectacle and deviations from the usual boundaries of genre films that from a certain point on you can just stop watching it altogether. Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger make the most expensive movie in the world in the late 1990s, and this is how it turned out? Probably around the time the film moves to Mars, the papier-mâché sets are perhaps a little too much, while at the same time the whole miniaturesque corridor structure feels like an adventure built out of Legos by a kid who drinks a lot of sugary lemonade. (04/21/2021)